Write Rules/Break Rules

Serial entrepreneur (as in killer, but more social) Loïc Le Meur has come up with 10 rules for anyone wanting to be successful in business, after he learned to break all of the accepted ones himself:

● Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible

● Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.

● Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.

● Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.

● Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.

● Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.

● Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.

● Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.

● Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.

● Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Having left France for the psychedelic climes of Palo Alto to start Seesmic:

‘a tool that enables bloggers to add comments and start web conversations in video with one another - an extension of the way they currently add text responses to blog posts.’

He’s inviting the community to help hire and dictate Seesmic’s development, which begs the question ‘what came first? the marketing or the idea?’.

A Fat Man we’ve been developing a similar system for a student community site, CUNXTuesday, which will go live shortly. Video commentary is a logical next step in social media interaction.

What disappoints me is that Loïc has felt the need to take this idea to America. What hope is there for the European start-up community if one of it’s leading lights defects to the Valley? Thank God Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are prevented from entering the US for fear of being imprisoned for their involvement in file sharing network Kazaa.

What the European start-up community needs are not VC’s nor angel investors alighting from silver clouds, but confidence. The technology is out there, what we need now are viable (non-ad based!!!!!) business models and to focus on our own communities.

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